Willy Benz studied physics at the University of Neuchatel and earned his PhD in natural sciences from the University of Geneva in 1984, with a doctoral thesis in astrophysics. He then pursued postdoctoral research at Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA) and Harvard University where he was appointed assistant professor in 1987. Later, he held teaching positions at both the University of Arizona and the University of Geneva. His commitment to teaching and research was recognized in 1988 with the Milton Fund Award, followed in 1989 by the Thomas Temple Hoopes prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Willy Benz has been a professor at the Physics Institute of the University of Bern since 1997. Serving as its director since 2002 and has been a member of the Swiss Science and Innovation Council since 2004.
He joined the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft as an external scientific member in 2007. Willy Benz has served on or is currently serving on several advisory bodies, including the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Science and Technology Committee (2009 – 2011), the Eidgenössische Kommission für Weltraumfragen (EKWF) since 2008, and the European Space Agency (ESA) Space Science Advisory Committee since 2010. Benz has worked as the Swiss Delegate to ESO Council since 2015, having previously chaired the Scientific Technical Committee. He co-investigated HARPS and is now working on ESPRESSO and NIRPS, two of the most advanced instruments on ESO telescopes today and the future. He is also a co-investigator for HIRES (the High Resolution Spectrograph), an instrument currently under study for ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope.
Willy Benz is the current director of NCCR PlanetS and a Professor of Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Bern. His research centers on planets within and beyond the Solar System, a field he has explored since the mid-1980s during a career that has taken him across the Atlantic to leading astronomy institutions in the United States before returning to Switzerland.
The CHEOPS mission: A unique interface between discovery and characterization of exoplanets
The Characterising ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) was selected as the first Small Mission (S-Mission) in ESA’s Science Programme in 2012, and was successfully launched on time and on budget on 18 December 2020 on a Soyuz-Fregat rocket from Kourou in French Guiana. CHEOPS is the first mission dedicated to searching for exoplanet transits using ultra-high-precision photometry on bright stars that are already known to host planets. Monitoring planets with high-precision photometry improves the measurement of their properties, such as radii and masses (via TTVs), and enables the definition of precise transit ephemerides, particularly for small bodies. This often leads to the refinement of the overall architecture of the systems (e.g. the discovery of new planets). Similarly, measuring occultations and phase curves with a precision of a few parts per million has opened up new avenues in the study of hot planets’ atmospheres. Due to its agility and ability to observe a large portion of the sky, CHEOPS uniquely interfaces the discovery of exoplanets (e.g. by the TESS satellite) with their subsequent spectroscopic characterisation by large space-based (e.g. JWST & ARIEL) or ground-based (e.g. VLT & ELT) facilities.
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